SA Book & Challenge Lovers discussion

It looks like someone is finally taking an interest in the ebook market in South Africa. Kalahari.net has just added an ebook section to their site.

It doesn't seem to have any local authors and the selection is still quite limited. Pricing seem to be OK, although it tends to be more expensive than overseas sites.

On some books there's a considerably saving when getting the ebook over the paperback, but on others the pricing is about the same.

Hopefully this will be the start of great things to come!

Thanks for letting us know!

This is great!
soon, other places will come on board - just like the music scene

We can only hope. I wish them all the best for this venture. Hopefully publisher will see that there is a huge market locally.

Their selection needs some serious work though. None of my favourite SciFi authors have any works available at Kalahari.

I agree Crusader. Very happy to see this development, but I wasn't too impressed with the selection. So much chick-lit, romance, and crime/mystery. I know that's not bad for some, but I generally avoid those genres.

I'm also not impressed with the price - in many cases the price is only slightly lower than the hardcopy and in some the e-book was so expensive I'd rather buy the hardcopy in store. I don't understand why e-books are so expensive. Presumably publishers have digital copies, so these books shouldn't have to be scanned and edited. Secondly, they're digital files, so selling them requires no shelf space (and therefore no rent or utility bills) and distribution is online, so there are no petrol, packaging or postage costs. And of course there are no printing costs.

Does anyone know more about e-book publishing? Why isn't there a greater cost reduction? Has it got something to do with publishing rights?

The higher cost is largely due to publisher's fear of ebooks. They see ebook sales as canabalizing their hardcover sales. That's why they tend to price ebooks higher than their hardcovers to encourage people to rather opt for a hardcover (on which they make the maximum amount of profit).

The publishers also believe that they need to recoup marketing, layout and editing costs from all editions and would like people to believe that printing and distributing of printed works are a minuscule expense. Apparently what they save on physical distribution goes towards paying for DRM (they insist on).

Where ebooks really shine is on older releases and backlist items. If you shop around it's possible to find great deals on those.

Oh, and Kalahari is also selling the Cooler eBook reader for R2599

Ah, figured it might be something like that. Thanks :)
Perhaps if they can come up with some kind of software that prevents users from transferring the files to another device they can drop the price dramatically. Although that won't solve the hardcover profit problem.

Pretty little e-reader, but I'm going to have to wait until the price drops to at least under R1000.

Or I get a big raise :)

Kalahari also has very cheap books atm:

http://www.kalahari.net/books/78608.a...